How do we picture a Roman slave? Perhaps in a white tunic, pouring a goblet of wine for his master? Now picture this. A heavily militarised stone quarry in Egypt, called Mons Porphyrites, where valuable red porphyry was cut into pillars and columns for the houses and villas of the Roman rich. There is a fort with a permanent military garrison. The roads to and from the quarry have checkpoints along them, and no fewer than 17 guard towers. 

As a slave you would work here under the burning desert sun until you died – which wouldn’t be very long. Meanwhile, in the gold mines of Carmarthenshire, Wales, you might have to walk for hours, day after day, on a huge treadmill to pump out the water from the deep mineshafts. Reading these accounts, it’s impossible not to think of Soviet labour camps.

Emma Southon is a former academic who now writes full-time about Rome, with an engagingly modern, chatty and sometimes sweary style. Edward Gibbon it ain’t, but it makes Servus a gallopingly entertaining if sometimes horrifying read. More important, I don’t think any book about slavery in the ancient world has ever made the daily realities so explicit, so haunting. The book is openly partisan, angry, disgusted, and blackly comical. She even describes Octavian, later Emperor Augustus, as ‘a repulsive little warlord’. Studying the Classics may sound dull, but there’s never a dull moment here.

The major source for slaves to feed Rome’s insatiable appetite for human labour was warfare, which both the Republic and later the Empire pursued with huge enthusiasm. When Scipio captured Cartagena in Spain in 209BC, but failed to secure the surrender of the Spanish commander, the Roman soldiers proceeded on their usual course of slaughtering every living thing they could find without mercy, cutting adults and children and dogs in half, until surrender was won. Scipio gained 10,000 prisoners: some 2,000 craftsmen were enslaved, while strong young men were sent to the galleys. Pretty much a death sentence.

When Rome captured Jerusalem in AD70, the ‘best-looking youths’ were kept for the triumphal ceremony, others went to the quarries in Egypt, and ‘multitudes were presented by Titus to the various provinces to be destroyed in the theatres by the sword or by wild beasts’, says the 1st-century historian Josephus. No hint of disapproval at this form of entertainment. So grim was a life of slavery that many people, facing such a fate, chose to kill themselves rather than fall into Roman hands.

The names, let alone the life stories, of these millions of slaves are virtually irrecoverable, with one or two precious exceptions. In Dacia (Romania), a six-year-old girl called Passia was sold for 205 denarii. In London, a ten-year-old girl called Fortunata (Lucky), from north-western France, was sold for 600 denarii. But that’s all we know of them. Their name, age and price.

If enslaved in a household, slaves were regularly beaten by masters and mistresses alike. One ancient physician wrote that he saw many patients requiring treatment for injuries they had sustained to their hands and fingers... whilst assaulting their slaves! Poor things.

‘Enslaved people lost eyes, broke limbs, were hit with bits of wood... and stabbed with pens,’ says Southon. The philosopher Epictetus had a permanently disabled leg after it was deliberately broken, according to one source, by his enraged owner when he was a child slave. Other disobedient slaves could have their achilles tendons burned out with hot irons, effectively crippling them for life but leaving them still able to work. Or they were blinded in one eye, making them less likely to escape and fend for themselves, but again, still able to work.

One historian suggests that all this punishment suggests a lot of passive resistance on the part of slaves, and we also have their masters constantly writing letters to friends complaining about their slaves’ impudence, laziness, answering back and so on. Hurrah! you feel. Beaten, blinded, crippled, but their spirits still unbroken. Let’s hope so.

The darkest chapter of all here concerns sex slavery, again regarded as completely normal in the ancient world. All slaves were literally and physically the property of their masters, so could be used according to appetite. Even the trope of gladiators having sex with rich ladies could also be sex slavery, suggests Southon: most gladiators were slaves.

Most horrific of all, a brothel at Ostia, the port of Rome, was called the House of Jupiter and Ganymede. Ganymede was cup-bearer and boy-lover to Jupiter, so the name strongly suggests a gay child brothel, while the wall art in the Lupanar brothel in Pompeii depict both women and boy prostitutes. If doubt remains, ancient writings record how to prevent such boys from reaching puberty, either with (alleged) puberty blockers or by castration.

Servus is grimly compelling and shocking from start to finish, though leavened with moments of welcome authorial humour, as even Southon struggles sometimes with the sheer savagery of the Romans. But it also raises some awkward questions. How could they tolerate the cruelty of slavery? Because, she says, ‘it was too big to see’. Slavery was the social norm, and a world without it was simply unimaginable, even for the Christians who worshipped a god of love.

The Romans were certainly crueller than us, far more tolerant of daily violence. But then might there be ‘social norms’ today that future generations will also regard with horror? Factory farming? Child slaves in Congo, mining cobalt for our mobiles? Perhaps we should never be too smug in thinking we are that much better than our forebears. It’s unlikely to be that simple.